Questions Regarding Nutrition in the Light of Spiritual Science

The fourth member is the bearer of the ego, of self-consciousness. This makes human beings the crown of creation, enabling them to rise above the things of the earth that surround them. Thus, human beings stand before us with three invisible members and one visible member. These always work together and interact with each other. All of them affect each individual, and each individual affects all the others. Thus it comes about that the physical body – I repeat, in parentheses, that all this applies only to human beings – as it stands before us, is in all its parts also an expression of the invisible members of human nature. This physical body could not have within itself the members that serve nutrition, reproduction, and life in general, if it did not have the etheric body. All organs that serve nutrition and reproduction, the glands and so on, are the outer expression of the etheric body. They are what the etheric body builds on the physical body. Among other things, the nervous system in the physical body is the expression of the astral body. Here, the astral body is the actor, the builder. We can form the mental image that just as a clock or a machine is built by a clockmaker or a machine builder, so are the nerves built by the astral body. And the peculiarity of human blood circulation, of blood activity, is the outer physical expression of the ego carrier, the carrier of self-consciousness. In a certain sense, the human physical body is also fourfold. It is an expression of the physical members, that is, of itself, and of the three higher, invisible members. The sense organs are purely physical; the glands are the expression of the etheric body, the nervous system of the astral body, and the blood of the ego.